Hot News

4.15.2008

BY CARYL VELISEK
AFP Correspondent

FREDERICK, Md. — Can Western Maryland become the Napa Valley of the East in viticulture? The question was posed during the 2008 Maryland Agriculture Commission Tour held April 10 in Frederick and Washington counties.
Knob Hall Winery was one of six stops planned for the Ag Commission members to meet with a diverse group of Maryland’s agricultural community and discuss ways to promote Maryland’s number one industry, agriculture.
First stop on the tour was Caprikorn Farms, at Gapland, Md., owned by Alice Orzechowski and Scott Hoyman, one of three dairy goat farms in the area. The farm is home to 120 head of Saanen goats and has been breeding dairy goats for 30 years and Orzechowski, who also grows flowers, said they can sell all the goats they can produce.
“We’re the longest operating goat farm in Maryland,” she said, “and we started when milk was still shipped in cans.
“We were shipping to artisan cheese makers but found they weren’t terribly reliable so we decided to get more involved. We are also the first licensed on-farm home goat cheese maker in the state.”
They are now milking 50 goats and their milk meets grade A standards. Milking is done mechanically and they are working to be classified a ‘certified, humanely raised’ herd.
“We haul to Chambersburg and Gettysburg and have hauled to Philly,” Orzechowski said.
The second stop on the tour was Knob Hall Winery near Clear Spring, Md., and owned by Dick and Mary Beth Seibert.
Seibert inherited the 173 acre farm and a large old farmhouse they are in the process of remodeling.
“When I first inherited the place I was told to sell for development,” Seibert said, smiling. Instead he decided to do something he could live with and that his children could work with.
Told by viticulture specialist with the University of Maryland Extension Service, Joe Fiola, that Washington County has plenty of the well-draining soil grapes require, and some of the best areas in the state for making wine commercially, Seibert started planting grapevines last year and hopes to add to that eight acres, another 30 acres by next year.
There is hope that Knob Hall Winery will encourage the development of a new agricultural industry in Washington County, Seibert said.
“The number of wineries in Maryland is growing,” Seibert said. “Last year Maryland was short 600 tons of grapes and that is only going to increase since there is also a shortage in California.”
The folks at Knob Hall hope to have the winery up and running by next year, Seibert said.
Just down the road the tour stopped at Clear Spring Creamery, home of Mark and Clair Seibert. An adjunct to Seibert’s job with the Soil Conservation Service, the Creamery is the natural outgrowth of the Seibert’s grass-based seasonal calving operation, which is in its second year. Cows are milked once a day, in the evening, and the milk is pasteurized on the farm. Milk is sold to their co-op and to farmers’ markets in Hagerstown and DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C.
There is 100 acres in grass, 72 of which is owned by the Seiberts, and it’s about three quarters of a mile to the farthest pasture, Seibert said.
When asked how milking only once per day instead of the conventional two times reduces milk production, Seibert answered, to about two-thirds to three quarters of normal production.
He also was asked about the chickens that wandered around the pastures and said they were recommended for fly control in the pastures, but they hadn’t had them long enough to find out if they were helping. He also noted that when they sold the eggs at the markets, people were more interested in how humanely the chickens were handled than the cows.
“Claire is the CEO of the operation and she does the kitchen,” he added.
“We do processing for four days and the markets in one.”
“I try to perfect the cheese and yogurt recipes we use,” Claire Seibert said.
“I have taken classes and we have a significant product in Camembert. We have tried not to get too diverse at first.
There is so much interest in ‘locally grown’ food,” she added.
When asked if there is a market for raw milk in Maryland, a subject that came up frequently during the tour, Seibert said, “I’m not sure and I’m not even sure if I would do it, if I could.”
The next stop on the tour was Windridge Farm near Adamstown in Frederick County. Owned by Robert, Tom, Teddy and Jeremy Butz, the brothers, who have long been grain farmers, and have tried aquaculture. processing dairy feed and various other ways to diversify their farming operation, are now producing biodiesel fuel made from yellow grease.
“With so many dairy farms disappearing, we are getting out of the soybean roasting business,” Robert Butz said.
Their first venture into biodiesel was with soybean oil thinking they could provide a steady market for their own beans and for those of other farmers in the area.
But with the skyrocketing price of soybeans, they looked into other sources for biodiesel and found the energy conversion ratio much more desirable with some other products, especially yellow grease.
“We would love to use soybean oil,” Jeremy Butz said, “but cost is just too prohibitive.”
One thing they like about the use of yellow grease is that it is not a food source, Butz said.
“We take the protein out and we recycle everything. We don’t have a magic machine, we just have good chemistry.”
To begin their biodiesel operation, they did away with the aquaculture, which they were not happy with, and gutted the building. With grants from Frederick and Montgomery counties, used equipment was incorporated into their distilling plant that they built themselves by trial and error. They have one patent and are working on six more, Butz said.
“We can do 10,000 gallons per day here at the farm, and we will be opening a one million gallon a year plant at Baltimore’s Curtis Bay.”
From the Butz Farm, the tour journeyed to Tuscarora, Md., and Rocky Point Farm, owned by Chuck and Paula Fry. Chuck Fry is a 4th generation farmer, farming on the farm that has been in his family for 128 years. The Fry family has been in the dairy business for 52 years.
They own 172 acres, farm 1,500 acres, and milk 180 cows. They milk at 1:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m., Fry said and their herd average is 20,000 pounds.
They also raise grain and anti-biotic-free turkeys for Hanes Protein in New York.
“We started with Round Hill in 1996 and there have been two other companies that have been bought out,” Fry said.
They get six week old chicks and raise 180,000 birds a year that generate 600 tons of ‘hot’ manure, which they apply to their crops.
From there the commissioners journeyed to Buckeystown and Hedgeapple Farm where Dr. Scott Barao, the retail marketing specialist, and Ryan Bapst, who is in charge of livestock production, explained their operation, which includes pasture-raised Angus cattle and a retail market on the premises.
In 1996 the Jorgensen family gifted a conservation easement to the Maryland Environmental Trust in perpetuity to ensure against development.
In 1997, the Jorgensen Family Foundation, Inc., was founded as a beef research and education foundation and the farm and land, herd, equipment and facilities were gifted to the Foundation.
To market the grass-fed beef raised on the farm, in February 2007, the market was opened in a circa1791 log structure that had been moved, log by log, from Boonsboro, Md. A 400 square foot freezer was added and retail sales began.
Sixty-seven head were sold through the store in 2007 and the ultimate goal is 105 head.
Hedgeapple contracts out some of their feeding locally.
Pastures are 80 to 90 percent alfalfa and the rest is orchard grass. There are two calving seasons, 60 percent in March and April and the rest in September and October.
Very little advertising has been done, according to Barao. Most is done by word-of-mouth.
“The word just seems to spread,” Barao said. “It’s very important to our customers that the beef is grown locally and they can see the cattle when they come here. We could very well sell more if we had it.”
The tour concluded with dinner at Dutch’s Daughter Restaurant in Frederick, and a meeting that was attended by a number of producers who were asked to voice their concerns to the commissioners.
A number of questions related to the CREP and CRP programs and there was also some heated discussion concerning the selling of unpasteurized milk in Maryland. There was also some discussion about Johne’s in cattle.
Luke Howard, chairman of the Ag Commission, said in his remarks that the tour was one of the best the commission had ever experienced.